passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or
friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.

From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient
passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's
_Tannhäuser_. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:

"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhäuser, while
Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal
and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and
self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles;
the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful
infatuation of Tannhäuser. The abandoned Venus
threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of
grief."

There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like
Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a
suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for
wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the
husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and
sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to
suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yet
Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of
the Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we
consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in
Lucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and
their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who
spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking
gymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,

"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his
labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with
him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary? Those
who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my
friends. When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one
grave should cover us."

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.
Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the
other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]


SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism
long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern
idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are very
fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is
famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate
to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those
that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were
actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying
those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would
get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit
dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they
made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor
girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of
these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in
thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his
personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates the
diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a
king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It
is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and
having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to
see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in
general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of
sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.
How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may
be inferred from what the Abbé Dubois says:

"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as
respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his
heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road,
or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste;
and will not stir to help him to a drop of water,
though it were to save his life."

"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the
Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women,
especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to
suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be
actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals.
Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who
kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.
In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.
What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such
superstitions:

"The enraged multitude did not wait for the slow
process of law, but put the offender to death with
their own hands." At the same time some animals "which
were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as
nuisances and destroyed in others." (Kendrick, II.,
I-21.)


EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY

If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins,
not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a
mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole
is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of
course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to
his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious
differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as
Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the
circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. The
doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally
true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the
pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic
delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the
present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals
within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies
for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds
that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has
become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of
the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their
young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation.
If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom
Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seems
to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are
connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other
argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic
love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest
sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a
savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally
while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty
for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one
more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's
emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as
well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem
in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.


AMOROUS SYMPATHY

In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not
exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his
personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as
a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happy
and save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous
sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of
personalities:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.
--_Sidney_.

It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.
--_Scott_.

To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic
disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than
beauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittily
remarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants
is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might
have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and
sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and
bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a
cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who
is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and
mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is
perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle
for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his
personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however
much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no
love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute
test, of romantic love.


IX. ADORATION

Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is "all adoration," and
in _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: "How does he love me?" Viola
answers: "With adorations." Romeo asks: "What shall I swear by?" and
Juliet replies:

Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.


DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the
"deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena,
in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:

Thus, Indian-like
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.

"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau,
Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of
humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the
last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of
instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern
lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and
carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living
goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however
fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of
the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is
marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is
in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it.
Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt
there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its
devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.

The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything
associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in
Goethe's _Werther_:

"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go
to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company.
What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in
order to have someone about me who had been near her.
With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I
saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the
hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.

"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being
placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at
night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge
that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the
buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these
things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I
would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand
dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid
that you should laugh at this. William, are these
things phantasms if they make us happy?"

Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to
a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard
Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:

"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have
worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll
kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your
handkerchief."

Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair
sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured
at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.
To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in
perpetual hyperbole:

It's a year almost that I have not seen her;
Oh! last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
--_C.G. Rossetti_.


PRIMITIVE CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN

The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an
entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being
universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among
ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost,
if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we
expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike
times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more
useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,
which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For
these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of
natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior
to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter
was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or
rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts
from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt
for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the
lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of
Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be
fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a
few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss,
II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread
that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and
fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was
only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to
quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains
(VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a
warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a
husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the
gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife
had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of
her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori
chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any
corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was
obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard
their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a
definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband;
unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.
(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by
elders and priests is the insulting

"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive
thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that
she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai
Saravasti, 13.)

William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of
Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and
misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:

"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable
commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and
her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals
of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally
practised, increasing the horror of her position, for
she is required to be a slave to a number of masters,
who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and
brutality. From the day of her birth until her death
(few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one
protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to
perform the most menial and degrading of services and
the entire manual labor of the community, it being
considered base of a male to engage in other labor than
that of warfare and the chase....

"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from
the village in which she lives, and is compelled to
take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the
open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her
husbands, being brought to her by the other women of
the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains
with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a
cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest
husband of its birth and the place where she has left
it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown
to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is
frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which
she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn
and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male
child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back
to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left
to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the
female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and
allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other
man as a prospective wife."[26]

In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive
separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to
speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he
spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his
concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the
bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most
pitiable," writes the Abbé Hue:

"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery
and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and
accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly
regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the
family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.
If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is
regarded and treated as a creature radically
despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."

He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the
bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in
some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening
themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on
the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to
climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the
University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) in
which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the
_Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in
ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief
literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese.
They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they
reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath
exploded:

"The subordination of women to men," so ran their
commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think
the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For
the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand
law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of
the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."

The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by
the men, Chamberlain says on another page,

"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any
generous European heart.... At the present moment the
greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still
her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him,
bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth
on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be
divorced at his good pleasure."

This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especially
aesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe and
America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy
with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar
qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as
the sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese
are unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what you
egotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it among
barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of
necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not
many women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally
despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food
may not be lost."[27]

There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for
females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian
Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that
this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi
shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:

"All the South American Indians, who still remain under
the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women
in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated
to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations
this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a
certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the
anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to
their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."

The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women.
"Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, as
we keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (_A.N._, 240), that among
the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not,
however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the
scarcity and money value of women.


HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES

Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary
contempt for women. While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands
of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan
females were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon
among the inferior races for women to be priestesses. Bosnian relates
(363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as
priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the
habit of serving them on their knees. This, however, was contrary to
the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to
the woman as such, but to the priestess. The feeling inspired in such
cases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess among
savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded,
and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a
pretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as a
sorceress. Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed
of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to
hallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible for
priestly duties. Consequently, if there was any respect involved here
at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue--a result of
superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine
qualities.[28]


KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY

Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds
by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often
confounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy,
or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's
rule in the tribe (political).

(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in
Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother,
while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line
of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more
than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a
book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinship
through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when
women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows,
however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts.
In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named
after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man,
either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as a
master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children.
Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):

"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the
custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman
rules there, and that a father is not master of his
children. On the contrary, the father regards himself
everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of
descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be
the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the
soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him,
so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore
he claims also those children of his wife concerning
whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them;
for they grew on his soil."

Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages
(73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through
females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with
the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy,
compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often
treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among
whom kinship in the female line prevails.

If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female
supremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausible
explanation as long ago as 1632. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (VI., 255),
after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:

"As these people are well aware of this corruption,
they prefer to take the children of their sisters as
heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their
brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their
wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews
come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who
are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they
are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but
his sister's son, who succeeds the father."

The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the
natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29]
and it doubtless holds true in many cases.

In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is
probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more
closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it
into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive
times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short
duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be
so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the
children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this
knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has
given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. We
are concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the female
line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?"
and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most
emphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory that
man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower
we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's
rule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker to
practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not
yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and
if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.


WOMAN'S DOMESTIC RULE

(2) As we ascend in the scale we find a few cases where women rule or
at least share the rule with the men; but these occur not among
savages but with the lower and higher barbarians, and at the same time
they are, as Grosse remarks (161), "among the scarcest curiosities of
ethnology." The Garos of Assam have women at the head of their clans.
Dyak women are consulted in political matters and have equal rights
with the men. Macassar women in Celebes also are consulted as regards
public affairs, and frequently ascend the throne. A few similar cases
have been noted in Africa, where, _e.g._, the princesses of the
Ashantees domineer over their husbands; but these apply only to the
ruling class, and do not concern the sex as a whole. Some strange
tales of masculine submission in Nicaragua are told by Herrera. But
the best-known instance is that of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their
women, as Lafitau relates (I., 71), owned the land, and the crops,
they decided upon peace or war, took charge of slaves, and made
marriages. The Huron Wyandots had a political council consisting of
four women. The Iroquois Seneca women could chase lazy husbands from
the premises, and could even depose a chief. Yet these cases are not
conclusive as to the real status of the women in the tribe. The facts
cited are, as John Fiske remarks (_Disc. Amer_., I., 68), "not
incompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery and
ill-treatment." Charlevoix, one of the eye-witnesses to these
exceptional privileges granted to some Indian women, declares
expressly that their domination was illusory; that they were, at home,
the slaves of their husbands; that the men despised them thoroughly,
and that the epithet "woman" was an insult.[31] And Morgan, who made
such a thorough study of the Iroquois, declares (322) that "the Indian
regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man,
and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so."
The two honorable employments among Indians were war and hunting, and
these were reserved for the men. Other employments were considered
degrading and were therefore gallantly reserved for the women.


WOMAN'S POLITICAL RULE

Comanche Indians, who treated their squaws with especial contempt,
nevertheless would not hesitate on occasion to submit to the rule of a
female chief (Bancroft, I., 509); and the same is true of other tribes
in America, Africa, etc. (Grosse, 163). In this respect, barbarians do
not differ from civilized races; queenship is a question of blood or
family and tells us nothing whatever about the status of women in
general. As regards the "equal rights" of the Dyak women just referred
to, if they really have them, it is not as women, but as men, that is,
in so far as they have become like men. This we see from what Schwaner
says (I., 161) of the tribes in the Southeast:

"The women are allowed great privileges and liberties.
Not infrequently they rule at home and over whole
tribes with manly power, incite to war, and often
personally lead the men to battle."

Honors paid to such viragoes are honors to masculinity, not to
femininity.


GREEK ESTIMATE OF WOMEN

Here again the transition from the barbarian to the Greek is easy and
natural. The ancient Greek looked down on women as women. "One man,"
exclaims Iphigenia in Euripides, "is worth more than ten thousand
women." There were, of course, certain virtues that were esteemed in
women, but these, as Becker has said, differed but little from those
required of an obedient slave. It is only in so far as women displayed
masculine qualities that they were held worthy of higher honor. The
heroines of Plutarch's essay on "The Virtues of Women" are women who
are praised for patriotic, soldier-like qualities, and actions. Plato
believed that men who were bad in this life would, on their next
birth, be women. The elevation of women, he held, could be best
accomplished by bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will
be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the
_adulation_ which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets,
and which has been often mistaken for _adoration_. George Eliot speaks
of "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to
be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be
"greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration--the
deification of persons--was out of the question. But there was no
reason why a Greek or Roman should not have indulged in servile
flattery and hypocritical praise for the selfish purpose of securing
the carnal favors of a mercenarily coy courtesan. He was capable of
adulation but not of adoration, for one cannot adore a slave, a drudge
or a wanton. The author of the _Lover's Lexicon_ claims, indeed, that
"love can and does exist without respect," but that is false.
Infatuation of the senses may exist without respect, but refined,
sentimental love is blighted by the discovery of impurity or
vulgarity. Adoration is essential to true love, and adoration includes
respect.


MAN-WORSHIP AND CHRISTIANITY

If we must, therefore, conclude that man in primitive and ancient
times was unable to feel that love of which adoration is an essential
ingredient, how is it with women? From the earliest times, have they
not been taught, with club and otherwise, to look up to man as a
superior being, and did not this enable them to adore him with true
love? No, for primitive women, though they might fear or admire man
for his superior power, were too coarse, obscene, ignorant, and
degraded--being as a rule even lower than the men--to be able to share
even a single ingredient of the refined love that we experience. At
the same time it may be said (though it sounds sarcastic) that woman
had a natural advantage over man in being gradually trained to an
attitude of devotion. Just as the care of her infants taught her
sympathy, so the daily inculcated duty of sacrificing herself for her
lord and master fostered the germs of adoration. Consequently we find
at more advanced stages of civilization, like those represented by
India, Greece, and Japan, that whenever we come across a story whose
spirit approaches the modern idea of love, the embodiment of that love
is nearly always a woman. Woman had been taught to worship man while
he still wallowed in the mire of masculine selfishness and despised
her as an inferior. And to the present day, though it is not
considered decorous for young women to reveal their feelings till
after marriage or engagement, they adore their chosen ones:

For love's insinuating fire they fan
With sweet ideas of a god like man.

In this respect, as in so many others, woman has led civilization.
Man, too, gradually learned to doff his selfishness, and to respect
and adore women, but it took many centuries to accomplish the change,
which was due largely to the influence of Christ's teachings. As long
as the aggressive masculine virtues alone were respected, feminine
gentleness and pity could not but be despised as virtues of a lower
grade, if virtues at all. But as war became less and less the sole or
chief occupation of the best men, the feminine virtues, and those who
exercised them, claimed and received a larger share of respect.

Christianity emphasized and honored the feminine virtues of patience,
meekness, humility, compassion, gentleness, and thus helped to place
women on a level with man, and in the noblest of moral qualities even
above him. Mariolatry, too, exerted a great influence. The worship of
one immaculate woman gradually taught men to respect and adore other
women, and as a matter of course, it was the lover who found it
easiest to get down on his knees before the girl he worshipped.


X. UNSELFISH GALLANTRY.

One day while lunching at an African foudak, half way between Tangier
and Tetuan, I was led to moralize on the conjugal superiority of
Mohammedan roosters to Mohammedan men. Noticing a fine large cock in
the yard, I threw him a handful of bread-crumbs. He was all alone at
the moment and might have easily gobbled them all up. Instead of doing
such a selfish thing, he loudly summoned his harem with that peculiar
clucking sound which is as unmistakable to fowls as is the word dinner
or the boom of a gong to us. In a few seconds the hens had gathered
and disposed of the bread, leaving not a crumb to their gallant lord
and master. I need not add that the Sultan of a human harem in Morocco
would have behaved very differently under analogous circumstances.


THE GALLANT ROOSTER

The dictionary makers derive the word gallant from all sorts of roots
in divers languages, meaning gay, brave, festive, proud, lascivious,
and so on. Why not derive if from the Latin _gallus_, rooster? A
rooster combines in himself all the different meanings of the word
gallant. He is showy in appearance, brave, daring, attentive to
females, and, above all, chivalrous, that is, inclined to show
disinterested courtesy to the weaker sex, as we have just seen. In
this last respect, it is true, the rooster stands not alone. It is a
trait of male animals in general to treat their females unselfishly in
regard to feeding and otherwise.